David Kipen, a former book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, has joined the battle to save newspaper book review sections from cutbacks and possible extinction with an essay on Salon.com. Kipen argues that the decline of reviews and reviewers is a symptom of a larger problem. “Book reviews and the people who write them are,” he says:

what biologists like to call an “indicator species.” An indicator species is the newt or worm in an ecosystem that nobody much notices until it starts to disappear. And even then, who really misses another polliwog — until six months later when, suddenly, even the buzzards are dead?

Like it or not, the indicator species for American daily journalism is the book review. Newspapers were cutting book coverage before the current flurry, among other places in Detroit, San Jose and Boston. Without exception, losing their book pages failed to stanch either reader loss or red ink. Were these papers already in trouble before they started cutting book coverage? Of course, but what did their publishers expect by further alienating people who like to read — the one constituency no newspaper can survive without? Put another way, how can institutions that cover electoral politics be so deaf to every campaign’s first commandment, namely, “Shore up your base”?

Kipen goes on to say that a National Endowment for the Arts study called “Reading at Risk” reported that “only about 47 percent of Americans can say they read a book for pleasure the previous year. That marked a decade-over-decade swan dive from 1992, and a power dive from the decade before.” Facing numbers like these, Kipen says, more has to be done to restore reading to a place of prominence in American culture. Kipen directs the NEA’s Big Read initiative and recommends other one-city, one-book campaigns (similar to CBC’s Canada Reads and regional reading initiatives that run in Canada).

Kipen also offers a theory about why the Resistance has been slow to take up arms. “There’s a furtive, beleaguered, unacknowledged glamour in feeling like the last bastion of civilization, the saving remnant beset on all sides by the forces of ignorance and greed. Who lives for baseball more than a Cubs fan? Everybody loves a lost cause — sometimes so much that we forget to fight for it.”